Grow Your Own Fruit At Home
Even if you don't have an orchard, you can still grow fruit — you just have to know which fruits work best in small spaces.
The Early Show garden expert Charlie Dimmock shows you how.
Dimmock says that blueberries are easy fruits to cultivate because they are evergreen.
"You can grow them in containers," she said. "No pruning really involved. They look attractive. You can just leave it to make a nice round shape."
She said blueberries thrive in acid soil. Scatter tea leaves on top of the soil which will add acidity to it.
Blueberry plants can be male or female and you need at least one male.
"If you live in a really cold area and want to grow fruit like citrus and figs, then grow them in containers," Dimmock said. "Put them out for late spring, summer and autumn and then you move them in when it gets cold. Make sure you keep watering citrus plants well through the summer as the fruit are forming. Otherwise, they won't form properly."
Oranges do not make good houseplants because indoors you will only get three or four oranges. One lemon goes much further than one orange, so try growing kumquat lemons instead.
"Keep it somewhere sort of cool at winter time so not in a really warm room but not somewhere that freezes," she said. "Just give it a mist over occasionally and that will keep it nice and healthy and happy and go light on the watering."
During the winter, Dimmock said plants don't need as much food and water.
"The light levels are so low you need to keep it nice and dry but just enough to keep it going," she said.
Now is a good time of year to get apple trees in the ground.
If you have a small garden but want to grow fruit, try apple trees. Dimmock showed an apple tree that has been grafted on to root stock which stunts it so it is small enough to grow in a container.
"Make sure it's a nice neat graft," Dimmock said. "You want to be using top soil for your containers like this because it's much richer and heavier and the trees are happier in that type of condition."
She said one apple tree will produce two or three bowls of fruit. In the winter leave the plant close to the house and don't worry about frost — apple trees need frost because it helps them grow for the next season.
"Just feed it well when it's growing," she said. "Come the autumn, you want to trim these long growths back so there's just two or three buds left."
For an aesthetic effect, Dimmock says grow your fruit plants, like blackberries, apples or pears, over an arch.
Dimmock showed a pear tree that is growing across a wall, so it takes up less space. Growing trees against a wall also provides extra protection and heat from the building.